What is Natural is Futile

Nemonymous

Nemonymous

Grimscribe
Sorry, I've just spotted there is a special thread for comments on CONSPIRACY. Here below is a copy of the message I just left on the 'TL and the Intentional Fallacy' thread about ten minutes ago.
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I have just returned from a short holiday with my wife ... 'distraction'?

And got on straightway with reading The Conspiracy Against the Human Race at the first opportunity. Thanks to TL and Dr B for making it availabe here.

I thought I would make some brief passing comments in media res - and I have reached the text up to Footnote 8 on page 7 (including the reading of footnotes). I don't want my passing thoughts to shade off into hindsight as I read on, so this is why I want to comment periodically as I read it (no guaranteed how quickly).

I have enjoyed this TL's 'sublimation' by means of the text so far ... more 'distraction' by means of such 'enjoyment' on my part?

Sublimation is indeed how I read it .... so far.

I wrote a line of poetry in 1965: "It is futile to call life futile as it is."

Not sure how this will pan out. Enjoyed it and been instructed. Instructive that such thoughts could be thought at all .... and made current in the context of one of my favourite 'fiction' writers ever ('anchoring'?). (I've put fiction in quotes as a safeguard pending my own further thoughts.... if any there be).

I feel as if I am swimmng. But I can't swim, have never been able to swim, despite having been brought up in a seaside resort as a child!

I have only spotted one typo so far: page 3: "What it natural" - 'it' should be 'is'.
And elsewhere in this first section I've read so far - should it not be 'inalienable' rather than 'unalienable'?

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Edited for this footnote:
This thread should be read alongside this thread: Potentially Suicidal Gods?
 
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Thanks, Dr B, for splitting off the thoughts in the CATHR comment forum into separate threads. I'm not sure I would have chosen 'What is Natural is Futile' as the title of this thread, but, there again, I might have done, in a different universe where I started the thread from scratch in this way. :-)

"You live a day a day to put life in" is another line of my poetry from the sixties.

I have just read 'Enlightenment' in 'Facing Horror', and I somehow thought of the word 'Zencore' (a word I chose to be the title of an anthology of Horror (nihilist?) fiction (at the printers as I speak)), as well as Zencore already being the name of a herbal 'medicine' with the advertised effects that 'viagra' has on male 'performance'. Seems somehow appropriate! Or misappropriate in an appropriate way!

I think literature is a religion in itself. And TL's CATHR (so far) is an (advertised) non-fiction (a Short Life of Horror) description of the nullities of ego, life's futility etc. and layered descriptions of thinking of the nullity of ego etc. (and then thinking of that thinking...), and all the ramifications that thinking has for death wishes, spiritual seeking ...
TL's non-fiction, so-called, in this essay, is also literature, I feel ... highly honed, professionally couched, fascinating, fulfilling, satisfying, basically 'true' (so far) to my own unarticulated thinking, and thus making my life more worthwhile (intrinsically worthwhile?), and presumably TL's life, too, by having written such a life-changing tour de force.

Just a mid-term brainstorming. More later. I don't want to give birth prematurely ... if at all.

No place for smileys here.
 
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I’ve been thinking more about the title of this thread: What is Natural is Futile.

Having now read to the end of the ‘Facing Horror’ section, I feel unhappy because nothing further naturally flows to my mind to say publicly at this stage about my reading of CATHR. “Keep quiet then, till you have!” I hear shouted. But this very thought has made me question whether my earlier posting of comments actually made me feel happy – when I (in fits and starts) ostensibly had something natural, instinctive, organically-subsequent-to-what-went-before, to say. In contrast, it is dreadfully downbeat to have to say something, i.e. to force yourself to concoct something to say, rather than depending on the natural flow of thought in life’s discourse-of-least-resistance.

But expressed thoughts-at-length are generally not natural, not auditable except, possibly, in rare moments of genius or inspiration that only ‘magic non-fiction’ such as CATHR can produce – and this is probably why and how its author does not break down into tears of despair (as one would otherwise expect with any author) during the polished treatments of blinding futility, cynicism, pessimism, visions of frightening nothingness, cultured barrenness etc. that he is managing to articulate so manfully, so meticulously, so learnedly, so downright calmly for us to absorb. Because it is a natural flow, not concocted, and this makes him (arguably) happy.

No natural flow in this thread, however, unless someone else enters it with his or her own flow of thought to channel me away from false concoctions.
 
I have now reached reading to the end of 'Supernaturalism' in 'Consuming Horror'.

I like the concept of the sense of the supernatural, as opposed to the supernatural itself.

What is SuperNatural is not Futile (to coin a new thread title)?

Mention of Joseph Conrad makes me think that 'Chance' is the plaster that our dire wounds (described in various ways in CATHR) need, ie. wounds inflicted upon us from simply having life - plus bandage-layers of narrators or of ego/id/nemo viewpoints that we can scatter around like placebos or decoy-puppets or shadows.

Aren't shadows on the wall sometimes more revelatory than seeing the people that cast them? CHANCE is a novel by Joseph Conrad. Here, the characters and particularly the heroine are drained of any motive or sympathy because of the layering of narrative: we hear a spoken voice telling an inscrutable narrator of someone else’s view of someone else’s view of certain events, mix and match between. But it does not seem to lessen one’s interest in the book: it is character-driven and sympathy is allowed to take a backseat in preference to exploring one’s own motives for assigning certain motives to certain types of people just on the basis of hearsay and chance. Conrad writes in introduction to CHANCE: “And it is only for their intentions that men can be held responsible” and this novel seeks to show, I think, that any intentions are essentially unknowable. I propose that even one's own intentions are unknowable: being shadows, too. The heart of darkness.
 
Overnight thoughts:

What is SuperNatural is not Futile (to coin a new thread title)?

Maybe this is an echo of my earlier thought: 'magical non-fiction'.
Magic Fiction turns fiction into reality (non-fiction) -- please see separate thread on Magic Fiction and Magic Realism -- whilst Magic Non-Fiction is vice versa. The only way, perhaps, for CATHR to counter any charges of incitement towards despair etc. is for it to call itself Magic Non-Fiction rather than a plain 'non-fiction' as it calls itself at the moment.

Style outdoing the subject-matter by means of being outdone by the subject-matter (as tendered on the 'Potentially Suicidal Gods' thread re Lovecraft)?

I shall later try to rationalise some new thoughts of mine regarding 'word clones' or 'word clowns'.
 
'Something unforeseen must have happened. You know, even grown-up people cannot always do what they want most.'

'Oh! Then why grow up?'

From Part 3 (1) of 'The House in Paris' (1935) by Elizabeth Bowen
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Is that not a better question than "Oh! Then why be born"?
Something to be said for being childlike (not childish).


I have now reached the end of the 'Living Horror' section in my first reading of CATHR. My ambiant self continues to be attuned to these (self-confessed?) self-righteous articulations of morbidity and futility and cynicism. I am glad I have been able to live long enough to read this genuine masterpiece. I have (always?) believed - but not articulated - that I was born simply to make bowel movements, assuaged by my (only) drugs of alcohol, art and family-building.


I shall make more comments when I've finished 'Creating Horror'. The greatest despair of all has not yet been articulated within CATHR, the despair of Namelessness. Perhaps that's why Lovecraft did not major on the Unnameable but on Azathoth.
To doff one's name, to remove it from the authorship of CATHR for example, would be the way to bring a Death-before-Death as trenchant as one could hope, a meaning to meaninglessness so meaningless it would no longer seem important to reach it. One's Name is the last God to write out of existence.

I call it Nemonymity. I, for one, have failed to reach this Heaven.


des


For Easter (a short novelistic take on death): http://weirdmonger.blogspot.com/2006/04/for-easter.html

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CATHR illuminates Thomas Ligotti's fiction. Thomas Ligotti's fiction, in turn, sheds much light on CATHR.

des, here's something from the vault which I think you will appreciate in a new way:

"'To know, to understand in the fullest sense, is to plunge into an enlightenment of inanity, a wintry landscape of memory whose substance is all shadows and a profound awareness of the infinite spaces surrounding us on all sides. Within this space we remain suspended only with the aid of strings that quiver with our hopes and our horrors, and which keep us dangling over the gray void. How is it that we can defend such puppetry, condemning any efforts to strip us of these strings? The reason, one must suppose, is that nothing is more enticing, nothing more vitally idiotic, than our desire to have a name - even if it is the name of a stupid little puppet - and to hold on to this name throughout the long ordeal of our lives, as if we could hold on to it forever. If only we could keep those precious strings from growing frayed and tangled, if only we could keep from falling into an empty sky, we might continue to pass ourselves off under our assumed names and perpetuate our puppet's dance throughout all eternity...'"
Thomas Ligotti - "A Soft Voice Whispers Nothing"​
 
Indeed, GSC. The fiction and the non-fiction are symbiotic. But which is which?

Is CATHR, in view of its articulations formally here labelled 'non-fiction', going to entail that the printed book of CATHR is going to be anonymous, i.e. when all traces are removed from this site? Authorship will then be a rumour ... like death.
 
DF Lewis said:
The fiction and the non-fiction are symbiotic. But which is which?
Click to expand...
I'll be damned if I know at this point, des. Thomas Ligotti's oeuvre is now cast in a new light and a new darkness which at once cancel each other out. Curiously, our fellow member candy refers to CATHR as a "story" in the Elizabeth Bowen thread. My friend and coworker is unintentionally correct. CATHR is our story. I would probably prefer not to be a character in that fiction. And that's a fact. ;)
 
GSC, interesting concept of yours regarding light (enlightenment) and darkness (despair) cancelling each other out, therefore creating nothingness.


Also relevant to some things mentioned in CATHR, it is interesting for me to recall that my very first hazy memory as a child was being rewarded for doing my bodily doings properly. A natural process channelled towards containment.
 
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